Lovecraft, H P - The Beast In The Cave

VIP免费

2024-11-24 0 0 104.64KB 5 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

The Beast in the Cave

by H. P. Lovecraft

Written April 21, 1905

Published June 1918 in The Vagrant, No. 7, p. 113-20.

The horrible conclusion which had been gradually obtruding itself upon my confused and

reluctant mind was now an awful certainty. I was lost, completely, hopelessly lost in the

vast and labyrinthine recess of the Mammoth Cave. Turn as I might, in no direction could

my straining vision seize on any object capable of serving as a guidepost to set me on the

outward path. That nevermore should I behold the blessed light of day, or scan the

pleasant bills and dales of the beautiful world outside, my reason could no longer

entertain the slightest unbelief. Hope had departed. Yet, indoctrinated as I was by a life of

philosophical study, I derived no small measure of satisfaction from my unimpassioned

demeanour; for although I had frequently read of the wild frenzies into which were

thrown the victims of similar situations, I experienced none of these, but stood quiet as

soon as I clearly realised the loss of my bearings.

Nor did the thought that I had probably wandered beyond the utmost limits of an ordinary

search cause me to abandon my composure even for a moment. If I must die, I reflected,

then was this terrible yet majestic cavern as welcome a sepulchre as that which any

churchyard might afford, a conception which carried with it more of tranquillity than of

despair.

Starving would prove my ultimate fate; of this I was certain. Some, I knew, had gone

mad under circumstances such as these, but I felt that this end would not be mine. My

disaster was the result of no fault save my own, since unknown to the guide I had

separated myself from the regular party of sightseers; and, wandering for over an hour in

forbidden avenues of the cave, had found myself unable to retrace the devious windings

which I had pursued since forsaking my companions.

Already my torch had begun to expire; soon I would be enveloped by the total and almost

palpable blackness of the bowels of the earth. As I stood in the waning, unsteady light, I

idly wondered over the exact circumstances of my coming end. I remembered the

accounts which I had heard of the colony of consumptives, who, taking their residence in

this gigantic grotto to find health from the apparently salubrious air of the underground

world, with its steady, uniform temperature, pure air, and peaceful quiet, had found,

instead, death in strange and ghastly form. I had seen the sad remains of their ill-made

cottages as I passed them by with the party, and had wondered what unnatural influence a

long sojourn in this immense and silent cavern would exert upon one as healthy and

vigorous as I. Now, I grimly told myself, my opportunity for settling this point had

arrived, provided that want of food should not bring me too speedy a departure from this

life.

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Lovecraft, H P - The Beast In The Cave.pdf

共5页,预览1页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Lovecraft, H P - The Beast In The Cave

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: